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Programme Note

'Village Wedding' is a series of musical and verbal images, describing a village wedding in Greece. My insertion of Isaiah's Dance, and the whole tone of Sikelianos' poetry, however, shows that everything in the natural and visible world, when rightly perceived, is an expression of a supernatural and invisible order of reality. The somewhat sober character of the music, also, hints at the later poems of Sikelianos, where myth becomes the agency for uniting his subjective and narrative voices into a sublime tragic vision.

John Tavener